HauntedMTL Original – The Shutterbug – Christa Planko
What a delightful tale coming from the mind of Christa Planko. It reminds me of the games my cousin and I used to play in a haunted house somewhere in the Northwoods. But they weren’t games for Corey and the gang, were they? – Jim
The Shutterbug
“Do you think this is a good idea?” Jeremy hesitated at the bottom of the warped wooden stairs. His three friends already stood upon the creaking porch.
The shortest, stockiest of the boys swept the cobwebs out of his way as he led the pack toward the front door. “What he means,” Corey said. “Is ‘do you think we’re a bunch of wussies?’”
“Hell, no!” chimed Randy and Raymond in unison. They were identical twins and always in sync.
“I’m not wussing out!” Jeremy cried. “I just don’t want to get busted for trespassing. The cops patrol the streets on Mischief Night, you know.”
“So, we’ll keep extra quiet,” Corey said. “Now shut up and follow me!”
Jeremy gulped and climbed the rickety steps. The boys stood by while Corey picked the lock. Slowly, he pushed open the door. It moaned on rusty hinges.
“Quick, guys!” Corey ushered the boys in and shut the door behind them. Their flashlights immediately scanned the dusty room. Nothing but a few pieces of furniture draped with sheets—a sofa, an armchair, a coffee table. Otherwise, the house stood as vacant as the day it was abandoned.
“We’re here again why?” Jeremy asked.
“To see the room where it happened,” Corey said.
“Um…where what happened?”
“I’ll tell you all when we get there,” Corey’s flashlight illuminated a staircase. “This way!”
He mounted the stairs, bravely leading the way. Randy and Raymond prodded each other to go first.
Corey paused halfway up the stairs and spun around. He frowned. “Come on!”
Jeremy shoved the twins from behind and they squeezed up the stairwell, side by side. They followed as Corey ventured up the second-floor hallway. He shone his light into each room, passing each one by until he came upon the largest at the end of the hall.
“This is it!” he cried. “The master bedroom. This is where they found her.”
“Found who?” Jeremy asked.
“Shirley Sugg,” Corey whispered. “The Shutterbug!”
“Oh, we know this story!” Randy elbowed his brother in the ribs.
“Yeah, but we thought it was just an old tale,” Raymond added, clutching his side.
“What tale?” Jeremy asked. “Someone please tell me already.”
“It was told to us as an old rhyme,” Randy started. Then he and his brother chanted in unison:
Shutterbug. Shutterbug.
Shirley Sugg was a shutterbug.
Photography her only role,
she captured your photo, then captured your soul.
She carved your smile with a box cutter.
The Shutterbug will make you shudder.
The boys all jumped as a rat suddenly darted across the floor, startling them.
“OK, that was really creepy, guys!” Jeremy panted, holding a hand to his racing heart.
“Oh, it gets better,” Corey smiled. “I know the true story. Shirley Sugg was an actual person. This was her bedroom.” He propped a lantern on the bed and turned it on.
The twins froze, then glanced about, trying to play it cool. Jeremy’s body shook with fright.
“Check you out, bro!” Corey snorted. “You really are a wuss!”
“Am not!” Jeremy snapped. He collected himself. “It’s just that it’s cold in here.”
He shone his light around the room.
“Hey, look!” He snatched an object from a nightstand and turned around. “It’s an old Polaroid camera!”
He held it up and aimed it toward them all.
“Group selfie! Smile!”
He pushed the button. Surprisingly, the camera groaned, producing a square, white photo. They stood around, watching as an image began to develop. Within minutes, their awkwardly smiling faces emerged.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Corey said.
“Why not?” Jeremy asked. “We needed to lighten the mood.”
Corey shook his head. “I didn’t get to tell you the story.”
“Well, tell it already so we can all get outta here.”
Jeremy crossed his arms and glared at Corey. Corey glanced from face to face, then began.
“OK. So, Shirley Sugg was a local photographer about half a century ago. She was an oddball, but good at what she did. She never married and she lived alone—here.”
Corey observed the captive audience before him, then continued.
“Over the years, she got stranger and stranger. She started walking around with a Polaroid camera, taking pictures of random things. Then one day, someone got in her way. That’s when she completely flipped out and went bonkers. They say she stalked the person afterward, then killed her.”
For dramatic effect, Corey lowered his voice to a whisper.
“When they found the body, it was posed in a chair, the mouth carved into a permanent smile. The ruined photo sat in the dead woman’s lap with her image scratched out.”
Corey stared at the horrified faces before him. The twins whistled low in disbelief.
“That is one creepy story, dude,” Jeremy finally said. “But whatever happened to Shirley? Was she arrested?”
“No,” Corey smirked, enjoying the fright he was giving his friends. “That’s the strange part. When the cops showed up at her house, there was no answer. So, they entered. What they found was Shirley Sugg in her bed in this room, dead. She had a huge grimace frozen onto her cold, dead face and a Polaroid on her lap. It was a selfie she took—in this very room, but her smiling face was missing from the photo. Instead, it fixed itself permanently onto her dead body.”
“Christ!” Jeremy cried. He slowly backed up, bumping into the bed. He jumped. The Polaroid fell out of his hand, onto the bed. It landed image side up.
“Holy, shit, guys!” he screeched. “Look!”
Corey snatched the photo. The twins gasped as they looked over Corey’s shoulder. The photo showed the entire group with the exception of Jeremy’s face, now a white smear.
“OK, let’s get outta here!” Corey said. He bolted out the door and down the hall, the twins immediately in tow, when a slam occurred behind them. The last sound they heard from behind Shirley’s closed bedroom door was Jeremy’s scream, followed by a maniacal laugh.
Christa resides in South Jersey—home of the Pinelands and the Jersey Devil. She is a medical writer by day with a passion for creative expression. Her poetry and short stories have been featured in several publications, including Jitter Press, Rune Bear, Tanka and Haiku Journal, and Every Day Fiction.
I have recently begun exploring Fibonacci poetry and penned this as a consideration for the Lovecraftian terrors while considering that Kansas was once an inland sea. It is also based on the beloved and enigmatic painting of Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth.
She
stares
ahead;
the landscape
yawns ever further
spanning the distance between us
and that deep unthinkable unknowable abyss.
This plain was once an inland sea,
a vast ocean filled
with terrors
beyond
our
ken.
Time
stands
still for
none of us.
It marches towards
our inevitable decay.
Our fragile flesh succumbs to the horror of the void,
cradling our fallen progeny
and yearning for home.
Christina,
hurry
back.
Now.
It
could
happen
anywhere…
The farmhouse beckons
from its horizon vantage point,
thousands of blades of grass groping like tiny tendrils.
The ancestors grasping at straws,
hoping to evade
inevitable
collapse,
their
loss.
Stars
fall.
Panic
sounds beyond
our comprehension.
Their silent screams fall on deaf ears.
We cannot interpret their guttural languages
or understand their diminutive cries
this far from the tide.
Slumbering
depths still
snore
here.
The
ebb
and flow
roil and churn
with water’s rhythms,
caress the expanse of grasses
covering this now fragile and forsaken ocean.
The landscape gapes and stretches wide,
reaching to grab hold
of her dress,
earthbound.
Lost
her.
I hope you enjoyed this jaunt through Christina’s World into pure terror. Feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website. Or go on a trip to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve.
So what better follow up to Invisibles Among Us in Nightmarish Nature than Monstrous Mimicry? Further exploring the leaps that critters will go to in order to eat and not be eaten. This time we’re focusing on those creatures that want to intentionally be mistaken for one another.
Insects Pretending to Be Insects
This is a pretty common subgroup in the mimicry set. Featuring such celebrities as the Viceroy Butterfly, which looks an awful lot like the Monarch. Why? Because everyone knows Monarch Butterflies taste nasty and cause indigestion. Duh? Though it appears the Viceroy took further cues from this and is not all that tasty in its own right either. Dual reinforcement is totally the way to go – it tells predators not to eat the yucky butterflies regardless. But some bugs go a bit further in this, imitating one another to seek out food or protection. Various wasps, spiders, beetles, and even some caterpillars impersonate ants for access to their nest or because ants aren’t as appetizing as their buggy counterparts to much of anything outside of the myrmecophagous crowd (as shared before, here’s a fun diversion with True Facts if you have no idea), though some also have nefarious plans in mind. And similarly, the female photoris fireflies imitate other firefly signals luring smaller males to try to mate with them where they are instead eaten.
Kind of Weird Mimicry: Insects Pretending to Be Animals
Moths are pretty tasty, as far as many birds and small mammals are concerned, so several of them find ways to appear less appetizing. Using mimicry in their larval form, they may try to look specifically like bird scat or even like snakes to drive away predators, with elaborate displays designed to reinforce their fakir statuses. And once they emerge as moths, they continue these trends, with different species flashing eye spots to look like owls, snakes, cats, and a myriad of other animals most of their predators don’t want to tangle with. But other insects pretend to be larger animals too, with some beetles and others producing noises often associated with predator, typically towards the same end – to deter those who might otherwise eat them.
Animals Pretending to Be Animals
Similarly some animals will mimic others. Snakes may resemble one other, as seen in the Milk versus King versus Coral Snakes and the popular rhyme, Red with Black is safe for Jack or venom lack, but Red with Yellow kills a fellow for all that it isn’t 100% accurate on the Red-Yellow end (better to err on the side of caution than not – so assume they are deadly). Fish and octopuses will imitate other fish for protection status or to conceal opportunistic predatory behaviors. And lots of animals will mimic the sounds others make, though Lyrebirds tend to take the cake in this, incorporating the vocalizations into mating rituals and more.
Really Weird Mimicry: Animals Pretending to Be Insects
Some of the weirdest mimicry comes out in animals pretending to be insects or small fish, where a predator will flick its strangely formed tongue that looks like a fish or water nymph to draw in more tiny critters that feel safe with their own, only to find themselves snapped up as dinner. Snapping turtles are notorious for this, disguising themselves in the muck to make their big asses less obvious and reinforce the ruse. Even some snakes do this.
Weirder Still
Then there are things that pretend to be plants. Like orchid mantises. Or sea slugs that look like anemones (some of which eat anemones and have stingers to match). I mentioned a few of these in the Invisibles Among Us segment last time, because some are highly specialized to look like very specific things and others just aren’t. Essentially, nature loves to play dress up and be confusing and adaptive. It’s like Halloween year round. And who can really argue with that?
Here’s a fun video from Animalogic exploring some of these themes. And feel free to check out more Nightmarish Nature here.
This prose poem considers sinking into self, how ongoing struggles with mental health and well-being have led me to take actions that reinforce the patterns therein, especially regarding depression and existential angst, succumbing to cycles that are familiar in their distress and unease. For these struggles are their own form of horror, and it can be difficult to break free of their constraints. I know I am not alone in this, and I have reflected upon some of these themes here before. My hope in sharing these experiences is that others may feel less isolated in their own similar struggles.
She withdrew further into herself, the deep, dark crevices of her psyche giving way to a dense thicket. She felt secure. In this protective barrier of thorns and stoicism, she hoped to heal from the heartache that gnawed at her being, to finally defeat the all-consuming sadness that controlled her will to live and consumed her joy. She didn’t realize that hope cannot reside in such a dark realm, that she built her walls so impenetrable that no glimmers of light could work their way into her heart to blossom and grow there. That by thusly retreating, she actually caged herself within and without, diving straight into the beast’s lair. And it was hungry for more.
Feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
williamdprystauk
May 21, 2019 at 5:16 pm
Great, old time, spooky horror fun!
I want more!